The Republican Party has been obsessed with the mantra “repeal and replace” ever since their archenemy piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law back in 2010. Now, on the eve of its potential revocation, a new study has been published that reveals one major benefit of the ACA – namely, it has greatly reduced the number of cardiac arrests in the US.

Writing in the Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers compared emergency medical care statistics for an urban country both before and after the ACA, better known as Obamacare, came into effect. They found that the incidences of cardiac arrest were 17 percent lower post-ACA.

This affliction is fatal in 90 percent of cases, so this study suggests that a lot of lives have been saved as a result of the ACA’s expansion of healthcare coverage. It only looked at Oregon, but the county they used has a varied demographic that is fairly representative of the wider nation.

Speaking to ResearchGate, coordinating author Sumeet Chugh, a cardiologist from the Cedars‐Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, speculated that the repeal of the ACA would “potentially negate these effects.”

“We hope that we will not have the opportunity to perform that study!” he added, echoing the views of medical professionals up and down the country that the ACA should stay.

Medical professionals and groups have come out very strongly against the BCRA. Guschenkova/Shutterstock

The Senate’s healthcare bill, the replacement to the ACA, is nothing less than a travesty – and as this study suggests, it will cost lives if it passes. America’s top medical professionals have come out very strongly against it, as have the public. Surveys show that the public dislikes the bill by a margin of 7-to-1.

Known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), it is a harsher version of the House’s bill: It will leave millions of the poorest Americans – particularly women, the sick, disabled, elderly, and very young – without healthcare of any kind, and instead gives billions to the wealthiest echelons of society. The President, for one, doesn’t appear to understand why people see this as a bad thing.

Our summary of its impacts can be found both here and here, but the most striking fact is this: If the bill is implemented, over 210,000 Americans will die by 2026 as a direct result of them losing coverage. Like this new ACA study, it is based on the healthcare plan trailed by Massachusetts a decade ago – the plan that formed the basis of the ACA.